A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton

Though the Bessemer-Siemens process of ‘mild’ steel manufacture which made large-scale production possible was not commercially available until the 1860s.

Later, in a letter to the 6th Duke on 4 .June 1836 (Devonshire Collections; 6

Duke’s Group No. 3512), Miss Mary Russel Mitford says she accompanied Wordsworth to the house – ‘that fine poet … who while illustrating all that is charming in natural scenery has yet so true and cultivated a taste for painting and architecture, never surely so triumphantly conjoined as at Chiswick House’.

The Italian garden, the conservatory and many of the original camellia plants still exist at Chiswick House Gardens, London, W4. The first book on the subject of the camellia appeared in 1819, Monograph on the genus Camellia by Samuel Curtis, and listed 29 varieties being grown in England.

The catalogues were consistently delayed by other work, and the fruit tree catalogue was finally finished in 1827, listing an astonishing 3,825 varieties.

In the second issue of Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine, he compares these wages to those of an illiterate bricklayer who would earn around five to seven shillings a day, whereas ‘a journeyman gardener who has gone through a course of practical geometry and land surveying, has a scientific knowledge of botany, and has spent his days and his nights in reading books connected to his profession, gets no more than two shillings or two and sixpence a day.’ While the Horticultural Society, he said, was humanely paying fourteen to eighteen shillings a week, an average London nursery was paying only ten shillings. Loudon regularly lobbied for increased wages for garden labourers and gardeners.

Araucaria araucana or Chilean pine, like the fern and the aspidistra a great Victorian symbol, and one that Paxton and the Duke did much to popularise.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_bd2d2b8a-fb11-52e1-8f81-71d352d1ba62)

I left London by the Comet Coach for Chesterfield, and arrived at Chatsworth at half past four o’clock in the morning of the ninth of May 1826. As no person was to be seen at that early hour, I got over the greenhouse gate by the old covered way, explored the pleasure grounds, and looked round the outside of the house. I then went down to the kitchen gardens, scaled the outside wall and saw the whole place, set the men to work there at six o’clock; then returned to Chatsworth and got Thomas Weldon to play me the water works, and afterwards went to breakfast with poor dear Mrs Gregory and her niece. The latter fell in love with me, and I with her, and thus completed my first morning’s work at Chatsworth before nine o’clock.

Chatsworth is in the heart of England, about 12 miles from Chesterfield, 26 miles from Derby and 10 miles from Matlock, below the Peaks in wild natural scenery a million miles from the soft lines of Bedfordshire or Chiswick. The park in which the Palladian mansion stands is nearly 11 miles in circumference and the setting is magically diverse – hills give way to peaks, thick woods to pasture, and through it all snakes the River Derwent.

The coach would have taken between ten and fifteen hours from London. Paxton apparently walked from Chesterfield, across the high moors through the night, arriving about three hours later at the thousand-acre estate. As the sun rose on this rural idyll and birdsong joined the ripple of the Derwent to pierce the morning silence, he would have seen for the first time the breathtaking natural grandeur of his new home. With his irresistible energy he was keen to take stock of the scope of his astonishing new job.

The old walled kitchen garden, probably conceived by Capability Brown in the 1760s, was a whole 12 acres designed to produce the finest quality fruit, vegetables and flowers, month in and month out. It lay in a quiet spot on the banks of the swiftly flowing river, a fifteen-minute walk from the house across parkland dotted with sheep.

The garden over which the young man now had control had a long and various history, constructed and planted over several hundred years according to prevailing fashion. In 1555 Bess of Hardwick, a rich and powerful local heiress, married William Cavendish and started to build the first house. The steep east slope was terraced and fish ponds, fountains and formal plots with orchards and gazebos in the Tudor style were introduced. In 1570 it provided a prison for the exiled Mary Queen of Scots.

In 1659 Bess’ grandson – the 3rd Earl – modernised the gardens, adding a massive and intricate parterre with formal, geometrical beds. Between 1687 and 1707 the 4th Earl (now 1st Duke of Devonshire) rebuilt the Elizabethan house in classical, Ionic style, employing as his architect William Talman, one of the first great gardener-architects. The famous pairing of London and Wise, owners of the enormous nurseries at Brompton Park on the outskirts of London, in turn made its mark on the gardens. George London designed a new parterre to the west of the house, the planting of these elaborate embroidery designs supervised by Le Nôtre who had laid out the patterned gardens at Versailles. Henry Wise (of Hampton Court renown) later partnered London on the design of a further parterre to the south of the house. A great greenhouse, a separate masonry construction with huge south-facing windows, was erected along with a bowling green with its own classical temple.

Befitting the zenith of the formal style, these new gardens were filled with fine stone and brass works of art. The Danish sculptor, Cibber, who worked with Wren on both St Paul’s Cathedral and Hampton Court, fashioned sea horses for the fountains, the garden deity Flora, and many other works to watch over the gravel paths, shady basins, formal orchards and ornamental knots. This was formal gardening on a grand scale, introducing architectural features to the landscape in order to complement the great classical house that was rising out of it.

Inspired by a vogue in France and Holland, waterworks were to become the most characteristic feature of great gardens. On the steep east slope, a grand cascade was therefore fashioned by another Frenchman, a hydraulics engineer, Monsieur Grillet (a pupil of Le Nôtre). In the two years from 1694, he constructed a feeder reservoir on the top slope – earthworks on a massive scale that could only have fired Paxton’s imagination as he took it all in that morning. The elegant cascade house was added a few years later and water poured over the domed roof of a temple and through the mouths of its sculpted dolphins before tumbling over steep, wide steps towards the house below.

On the south front of the house, beyond the grand parterre, the slope was levelled and a canal dug in the last years of the seventeenth century, a flat sheet of water reflecting the sky and the lime walk to its west in stark contrast to the majestic River Derwent. Already in 1700, Chatsworth had become a school in which to learn gardening on a grand architectural scale. The gardens were freely open to the well-heeled public and the many visitors were astonished by this display of social rank and civilisation in the midst of the wild Derbyshire Peaks.

From the 1730s, much of this old garden, though not its architectural features, began to be erased. Kent, architect of Chiswick House, was the leader of the new style of gardening which embraced nature and fields over the formal designs and fountains of his predecessors. The 1st Duke’s grand masonry greenhouse at Chatsworth was now moved, a pineapple house built and a lawn melting into park obliterated the parterre. All that remained of the ornamental was swept away in favour of the elitism of the landscaped park. Bess’ terraces were destroyed. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown removed the straight lines, the patterned planting and most of the flowers and topiary and undertook a massive tree-planting programme with carpets of grass stretching to distant stands of trees. Once again the gardens were moulded by fashion and Chatsworth, rich in Walpole’s perfect elements for a romantic garden – ancient trees, massive rocks, sweeping rivers and dashing natural waterfalls – provided an impeccable framework for grand rural ‘improvement’.

This was the park inherited by the 5th Duke and his beautiful and wayward wife Georgiana, and by their only son, the 6th Duke. Since Georgiana and her husband both preferred courtly and political life in London, the gardens saw almost no activity for 50 years – a grotto was built for Georgiana but little else – and they were all but neglected.

Soon after inheriting in 1811, the new duke started to rearrange again. Embracing the latest interest in flowers and flower beds, he reintroduced a parterre in front of the greenhouse in 1812 and a few years later he planted nearly two million forest trees in the old Stand Wood, rising on a hill to the east of the house. The trees covered an area of over 550 acres. Oak, ash, beech, elm, sycamore, poplar and birch, larch and spruce firs were all planted 4 feet apart. In the early 1820s, over 30,000 more trees were planted, earning the Duke the Gold Medal of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

The 6th Duke was a child of the Regency period and highly civilised, a patron of the arts and sciences but, unlike his parents, he was a liberal in politics and sentiment. Delayed by the weather, he had left for Russia that morning, 9 May, not to return to England for six months. In his absence, there was work in progress. He had commissioned the fashionable architect, Jeffry Wyatt,

to begin a vast remodelling of the house and parts of the garden and, when Paxton arrived that morning, the enormous new north wing extension, which would entirely change the scale of the house, was in the final stages of construction. Vast alterations in the layout of rooms and corridors were being planned; a new scullery, larder and kitchens were finished, new staterooms, an elaborate ballroom, dining room and sculpture gallery were projected. It was the height of modern aristocratic luxury, testimony to the Duke’s grand conceptions and deep purse. At the time of Paxton’s arrival, stirred though he must have been by the glorious gardens, this part of the house must have still been something of a building site – he describes the library as looking like ‘a lumber room’.

Wyatt was also turning his attention outside, forming plans for the garden in the new Picturesque

taste practised by Repton and directing a refocusing of attention from landscape and park to a formality of design based around the house, with symmetrical arrangements of sculpture and clipped trees and new embroidery parterres. The parkland immediately surrounding the house was being transformed into a ‘pleasure ground’ in which nature was once again dominated by horticulture. A new wide gravel walk nearly a third of a mile long and to be flanked by the Duke’s favourite trees, the monkey puzzle, was being fashioned, in what the Duke was later to call Wyatt’s ‘first great hit out of doors’. The west garden was to be relevelled out of Brown’s slope, with the sea-horse and tulip fountains fed by underground pipes from water in the cascade and, ever a perfectionist, the Duke also moved the whole cascade sideways to be in a more perfect alignment with the new building.

As the numbers of visitors increased during the early part of the nineteenth century, regulations concerning the visiting public were put in place and altered only marginally each year. Before the railway came to Rowsley, parties were limited to about a dozen; the house and garden were freely open every day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m, with reduced hours often imposed on Saturdays; carriages had to depart and return later for their passengers; dogs were expressly forbidden and on wet and dirty days permission could be refused to visit the principal apartments. In the gardens, the groups were accompanied by one of the garden staff, and the waterworks were played for all visitors on request.

In the Duke’s Handbook, printed privately for his sisters in 1845, the Duke wrote that when Paxton arrived he found ‘at the kitchen garden … 4 pine houses, bad; two vineries which contained 8 bunches of grapes; 2 good peach houses, and a few cucumber frames. There were no houses at all for plants, and there was nowhere a plant of later introduction than about the year 1800. There were 8 rhododendrons and not one camellia.’ Of the kitchen garden he wrote ‘[it] was so low, and exposed to floods from the river, that I supposed the first wish of the new gardener would be to remove it to some other place.’ Paxton did not move it. He made it flourish.

Whatever he thought of the state of the gardens, Paxton could not have failed to have been dazzled by the gilding on the windows of the south and west aspects of the house. While the story of his scaling of the kitchen garden walls has been mythologised and succinctly demonstrates his extraordinary vitality and thoroughness, an interesting note in an unpublished diary suggests that in fact he particularly felt his own youth on this morning and understood the importance of an impressive start: ‘instead of going to bed, walked round grounds and so set men to work at 6 – being young this gave him the authority which he wanted’.

This done, the housekeeper, Mrs Hannah Gregory, and her niece, Sarah Bown, were waiting to meet him in the kitchen. Sarah was the third of a family of four daughters from Matlock, where her father owned a small mill turning parts for the cotton-weaving industry. She was three and a half years older than Paxton, with a generous private fortune of £5,000. Only one hasty sketch by William Henry Hunt exists to show her as a young woman – slender and perhaps rather plain. She was, by all accounts, educated, determined and reserved, and she was on the shelf. Her aunt, running the house and answerable only to the steward, was earning £20 a year against Paxton’s £65. As the housekeeper, Hannah benefited from living in the house with her full board. As head of the gardens, however, Paxton was one of the highest paid members of the estate, answerable only to the Chatsworth steward, Thomas Knowlton, who earned £150 a year.

As Paxton describes, he and Sarah fell in love at first sight. The earliest of his letters to have been preserved is, appropriately, addressed to her, written during 1826. She is his ‘lovely endearing angel … the adorable object of my heart. To say I love and adore thee my dear is but trifling – you are the very idol of soul … rest assured while I draw breath it will be my study to make myself more dear … I am and shall ever be yours till Death.’ She had apparently asked for him to send her a copy of the lines of a popular verse called ‘Fare You Well’, but she could not have known the irony implicit in this leave-taking almost from the moment they first met.

Sarah and Paxton were married on 20 February 1827 and moved into the cottage on the edge of the kitchen garden, the broad river to their right, the steep hills and woods to their left and with the windows of the great house flashing on the slope to the front.

On the Duke’s suggestion, Wyatt remodelled the Royal Lodge at Windsor, and then, starting in 1824, Windsor Castle for George IV. This got him his knighthood in 1828 and the rather grander name of Wyatville by which he is now most often described.

The Picturesque as a landscape theory was first described by Sir Uvedale Price in the 1790s. Repton took up the idea in his own landscapes to create the sense of embellished neatness’ where the art of horticulture prevailed over nature.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_aa0ee165-d15b-51e4-a0a7-8c47140c64c0)

There were regulations in force in the gardens and it is likely that Paxton reviewed these when he arrived, fresh from the strict environment of Chiswick. The men were encouraged to keep diaries for their own improvement – noting new plants, weather fluctuations and daily activities. Above all else, there was to be prompt attendance, good order and sobriety, and contravention of these key rules could mean instant dismissal. The hours were 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the summer with a half-hour for breakfast and one hour for lunch; in the winter, working hours were decided according to the weather. Sunday hours were from 8 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. between November and March and from 7 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. for the rest of the year. Fines were imposed: sixpence for anyone arriving later than ten minutes after the lodge bell had rung, two shillings for anyone absent without permission – a rule applied to Christmas Day like any other. Sixpence would also be levied on any man found lounging or wasting time in the gardens, failing to clean and stack the tools allocated for his personal use, or if any panes of glass were broken through his inattention. The gathering of fruit, vegetables, flowers or plants without permission attracted the serious fine of five shillings, and dismissal on the second occurrence. All fines were deducted fortnightly from wages and, according to James White, one of the under gardeners, ‘if anyone feales himself greaved or aney ways unfairly dealt with in the administeration of these rules I desire to have the matter explained’.

Paxton had soon roused the men to a flurry of activity. Despite the mess created by the building work, principal paths had to be maintained and smartly gravelled; there was trenching, digging of beds, raking of leaves and clearing of cuttings to be done, and pots had to be washed and stacked ready for the needs of constant transplanting. In the summer, the more tender plants were carted from their shelter and planted out into beds; hedges and grass-edges had to be clipped, trees tied back, soil or dung carted to where it was needed. Everything had to be managed carefully, lest the Duke should decide to arrive at any moment.

He did indeed return to Chatsworth from Russia in early December and he noted in his daily journal: ‘Chatsworth, che gioya! I found great progress.’ The next day, having looked over his property, he noted, ‘I am enchanted … My new gardener too, Paxton, has made a great change.’

Throughout 1827 the Duke was preoccupied with his duties as Lord Chamberlain to the Royal Household – duties he cared little for but could not happily decline – and by his place in the House of Lords, where great electoral reform was being debated as a result of the wars in Europe and the growing, predominantly urban unrest at home. Socially, Devonshire House and Chiswick occupied his attention in all but the shooting season when he returned to Chatsworth, and was again delighted by the progress he saw.

That year the Duke appointed Benjamin Currey as his London solicitor and auditor with direct responsibility for all his affairs and accounts. This was indicative not only of the aristocrat’s lethargy when it came to accountable expenditure, but also an increasing movement towards professionalism in the running of large estates. Currey was not a landowner himself as had always been the case in the past, but a member of the professional upper middle class. All the agents on the Duke’s various estates reported to Currey.

Quietly, Paxton worked away in the gardens. Gradually all the fountains were repaired and improved, iron pipes replacing lead. In the west garden, an ornamental wall was constructed, drains were repaired or replaced and parts of the garden newly laid out, with new walks added to the pleasure grounds. With his own eye for structural detail, Paxton began to work with Wyatt to amend the architect’s orangery designs. The Duke, in his own words now ‘bit by gardening’, conceived it as a conservatory to join the sculpture gallery to the new wing. He wanted it quickly and he purchased orange trees from the Empress Josephine’s collection at Malmaison, an expensive Rhododendron arboreum from Knight’s exotic plant nursery in the King’s Road, and an Altingia excelsa which came to be particularly admired. Paxton must have been thrilled with the Duke’s growing interest in plants and in the changes he was hurrying forth.

The following year, Paxton’s attention turned to the kitchen garden. A new orchard was added to it and the wire fence around the flower garden was removed. On a modest scale, he turned his attention to glass. A number of famous glass buildings had recently been constructed in England including those at Syon House in Brentford, Hungerford Market in London, the upper terrace garden of Covent Garden Market and a surprising conical glasshouse at Bretton Hall designed by Loudon and Baileys. At Chatsworth, Paxton repaired the existing pineapple and peach houses and then started to build and experiment with the design of a number of new greenhouses and stoves in which to cultivate and force all manner of fruit and vegetables.

When later asked to describe the process of design and construction of the Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851, Paxton was at pains to emphasise a process of years of experimentation with glass buildings, a logical development which had led him to that point. In his first reading of a paper in public, he noted that ‘in 1828 … I first turned my attention to the building and improvement of glass structures’. He found the various forcing houses at Chatsworth were made from coarse, thick glass and heavy woodwork, which rendered the roofs dark, gloomy and ill-suited for the purpose for which they were built. So he bevelled off the sides of the rafters and sash bars, lightening them considerably and discovering that the buildings lost no structural stability in the process. Frustrated by putty which failed to withstand the extremes of sun, rain and frost and which disintegrated and allowed water to drip constantly inside the houses in rainy weather, he also contrived a new, lighter sash bar, with a groove to hold the glass, obviating the need for putty altogether.

While Paxton thought that the popular, modern metallic glasshouses espoused by Loudon were graceful in appearance, he concluded that wooden structures were preferable. One advantage was that wood was less expensive than iron. More importantly, he understood that, as the iron in the sash bars and rafters expanded and contracted according to the outside temperature, the glass was prone to breakage. In addition, iron corroded and was far more complicated to repair, whereas a wooden roof needed only a common carpenter. As the debate was revisited in the pages of the Gardeners Magazine, and as his own experiments proceeded, Paxton became increasingly convinced of the superiority of treated wood over iron, experimenting with finer and finer sashes and rafters to admit the greatest amount of light into the house. Within a very short time, the new glasshouses he built yielded fruit and vegetables in perfection, and a profusion of flowers capable of filling the house.

Nine months after their marriage, on 5 December 1827, Paxton and Sarah’s first daughter, Emily, had been born. She was baptised twelve days later in the local village of Edensor. Sarah quickly became pregnant again and their first son, William, was born in January 1829.

The Duke had spent much of 1828 away from Chatsworth, returning only in September and October and noting again the great progress there. He began to take a closer interest in his gardener, visiting the kitchen garden and asking Paxton to thin the woods – showing a confidence in his new man which no doubt put the regular woodsman’s nose out of joint. In early 1829, the Duke walked out in the snow with Paxton to see the woods and sought him out on several occasions to discuss the management of his trees. He returned again in April, when an entry in his diary reveals the growing regard he held for the gardener who was transforming the park before his eyes: ‘I went to woods, much pleased – poor Paxton has been very unwell.’ Paxton rarely complained of illness, whereas the Duke was something of a hypochondriac, beset with hayfever, flu, inflamed eyes, stiffness and a multitude of other, often minor, afflictions which could cause him to be bedridden for weeks at a time. He had a peculiar tenderness for another man’s health.

This was a particularly happy year for the Duke. His sister Georgiana’s daughter, Blanche – his adored, adoring and favourite niece – announced her engagement to William Cavendish, Lord Burlington, the son of the Duke’s cousin, and his appointed heir. He, meanwhile, was busy with Wyatt, with politics and with parties in London, leaving Paxton to embark on his first great landscape scheme for the park and one of the earliest of those curiously Victorian garden features – the pinetum.

Pinetum is the name given to a collection of one or more of each variety of conifer worthy of cultivation. With tens of new varieties now being introduced to Britain, the formation of one offered satisfaction of the collector’s instinct on a grand scale. Here, Paxton’s early experience at Chiswick combined with the Duke’s own strong arboreal interests to create a startling miniature world. It is still there, a place of surprising and extraordinary tranquility, a group of trees strikingly foreign compared to the native hardwoods in the Stand Wood higher on the slope. In spring, swathes of daffodils and piercing birdsong delight in the sunlight filtered by the cool green branches.

That this was to be one of the earliest collections to be planted in England is not entirely surprising.

The creation of a pinetum required not only a serious budget but a large amount of empty ground, separate from any other garden feature. In 1829, 8 acres of the south park were given over to the plan and the ground began to be formed in the summer. Paxton carried the seeds of the Douglas fir, the pride of California and reputed to reach 200 feet high, from London wrapped in his own hat. A Norfolk pine was fetched from Ireland by Andrew Stewart, Paxton’s foreman in the kitchen garden. A giant redwood, the monkey puzzle, hemlock spruces and the Japanese white pine were purchased and planted along with tall larches. In all, over 50 species of pine were mixed with cypress, juniper, Salisburia, thuja and yew, creating a collection of every kind of hardy conifer that could possibly be procured, each planted according to its botanical classification and clearly named on painted wooden tallies. According to the Duke, the pinetum was quickly admired ‘but no two of a party take the same view of it; one extols the scenery, another is in raptures at the old oaks, and a third wonders and asks, why I plant the fir trees so thin’.

It must have been tremendously invigorating for the young Paxton to have control over the conception and planting of such a valuable and extensive collection, combining scientific with ornamental purpose. It is possible that even at this early stage, he conceived it as part of a much larger collection of trees, an arboretum, which in some years’ time would be planted around a new 4-mile walk through the pleasure grounds since part of the new walk was already completed by the time the Duke returned to Chatsworth again in the summer. In addition, the west garden was now newly planted and Cibber’s great sphinxes had been moved there.

So pleased was the Duke with his gardener that he took him to Bolton Abbey – his property in Yorkshire – to shoot. Paxton was ‘enchanted’ – quite the best reaction for a Duke proud of his castles and palaces, deeply desirous that they should be admired and provide enjoyment for his visitors. As if he needed further reason to value the gardener, the fruit ripening in the new greenhouses, particularly melons, figs, peaches and nectarines, started to win medals at the Horticultural Society shows at Chiswick House.